Kalyn Hoggard | Monday, 19 January 2026
The weather has finally forced me inside. I did get a few days of good practice outside over the last week, but the weather again is taking a turn toward miserably cold. I’m confident that real men like Mathias would be outside working on max carry on a day like today, but I get cold. Not practicing is not an option for me at the moment. Working on dialing in your cast can be a time-consuming process, and if I want to be competitive in Italy, then I have no time to waste to iron things out. Unfortunately, I don’t live on a houseboat in the jungle, and I don’t have castable weather conditions for about three months out of the year. Where do you go, what do you do, with distance is there anywhere that you can really cast indoors, how much does it cost to cast in the Superdome, If you can figure out a place to cast inside, then is it even valuable for your competition cast?
This certainly isn’t a novel idea. Rick Hartman spent a lot of time casting indoors, and I have heard that other competitors around the world have spent time inside as well. Rick did have a word of caution. Now that he is back to casting outside, he wants me to make sure that I watch my backcasts very closely when I am casting indoors. The idea being that ticking inside on whatever surface you are practicing on may not have as much of an impact on the cast as grass or water would have. That could lead to you believing that you are on and throwing really well, but your timing is actually off, and those casts would tick and fall short. I can certainly see his point here and am doing my best to video everything.
Paul made an astute observation as well. If the point of practice is to work on your distance cast and you don’t have room to do that effectively, then casting inside may be pointless for distance.
To elucidate his point a little bit:
If I want to have a back cast of 90 feet, then I need to be able to stand in a place and at the minimum hit a wall with the fly line 90 feet behind me. Anything short of that is not going to mimic my distance cast exactly. If I want my delivery cast to turn over and land the fly at 135 feet, then I need the space to do that in the front me. And again, if I don’t have the space available to do that then I’m working on a cast that is different than what I would be working on outside. I will also be judging the loops and adjusting for the indoor cast that I may not want to make for my outdoor cast. I don’t get to work on the skill of adjusting for wind and so on.
Given that there is a casting competition in February, the weather is terrible, and I’m still learning, I have decided to cast at an indoor soccer field in Madison, Wi. I’m casting on turf, which I kind of like. The issue for now is that the total distance of the inside of the field is 182 feet, which means the most I can get out of the field is a 90 foot back cast and I’ll need the leader and fly to hit the wall. After it hits the wall, I need to get the line back to slack-less before the rotation of the forward cast. This is certainly doable, but it's easier to carry a shorter back cast. For the forward cast this means that I only get 90 feet as well, but on the delivery I just throw the line into a sign above the soccer goal.